THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Read Online Free PDF

this new constitutional order comes to maturity.
    Related theses can be found elsewhere. The notion that state formation in Europe occurred as a result of a revolution in military tactics (a claim made by Michael Roberts and others), the “short century” thesis (the notion that the century began in 1914 and ended with the end of the Cold War) associated with Eric Hobsbawm, and even the notion that a new form of society is coming into being (proposed by Peter Drucker, among others) are well-known. My thesis, however, implies, but also depends upon, the constitutional/strategic dynamic of five centuries, and it is this dynamic that shapes the expectations I put forward about the future structure and purpose of the market-state.
    While Book I treats the individual state, Book II, “States of Peace,” deals with the subject of the society of states. The society of states, as described notably by the late Hedley Bull, is to be distinguished from the state system. The state system is a formal entity that is composed of states alone and defined by their formal treaties and agreements. The society of states, on the other hand, is composed of the formal and informal customs, rules, practices, and habits of states and encompasses many entities—like the Red Cross and CNN—that are not states at all. International law is usually defined in terms of the state system. There are, of course, exceptions to this way of looking at international law, particularly in the work of Myres McDougal and his followers. In Book II, I treat international law as the practices of the society of states rather than as an artifact of the state system. I argue that international law is a symptom of the triumph of a particular constitutional order within the individual states of which that society consists (and is not therefore a consequence solely of the international acts of states). International law arises from constitutional law, not the other way around.
    Part I of Book II, “The Society of Nation-States,” deals with the society of states in which we currently live. It traces the origins of this society to the abortive peace that followed World War I and the American program that attempted to superimpose the U.S. constitutional model on the society of states. Part I then brings this plan forward to its collapse in Bosnia in the 1990s, and concludes with the claim that the society of nation-states is rapidly decaying. Although it is not novel to encounter a claim that the nation-state is dying, my thesis is markedly different from others because it derives from my general conclusion that the dying and regeneration of its constitutional orders are a periodic part of the history of the modern state. Those who write that the nation-state is finished are usually also of the view that the nation-state is synonymous with the modern state itself. Thus they are committed to maintaining that the State is withering away, a highly implausible view in my judgment. Once one sees, however, that there have been many forms of the modern state, one can appreciate that though the nation-state is in fact dying, the modern state is only undergoing one of its periodic transformations.
    Part II of Book II, “A Brief History of the Society of States and the International Order,” revisits the historic conflicts that have given the modern state its shape and which were the subject of Part II of Book I. In Book II, however, the perspective has changed. Here I am less concerned with epochal wars than I am with the peace agreements that ended those wars. Part II makes the claim that the society of modern states has had a series of constitutions, and that these constitutions were the outcome of the great peace congresses that ended epochal wars. The state conflicts discussed in Book I are taken up in Book II in terms of their peace conferences, culminating in the twentieth century with the Peace of Paris that ended the Long War in 1990. In these chapters, the emphasis is